Just a reminder to DONATE: network guru Chris Boyd served EFF-Austin as board member and treasurer for 20+ years until his passing on May 13. In his memory, we're still soliciting donations to support Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and EFF-Austin: gofund.me/dcb51faa

Adulthood is caring about the differences between Sections, Columns, and Tables in LibreOffice when it comes to document layout and flow.

A good friend and fellow board member of mine passed away recently. Help us honor Chris' memory by donating to Electronic Frontier Foundation in his name. Whether it's $5 or $500, we, and Chris, thank you.

Our next meetup features @eff.org's Cindy Cohn talking to us about code as speech, join us!

Our meetup next month will feature Nate Bartram of @thenewoil.org discussing the basic of improving your phone privacy, join us!

Woot, self-hosted Ghost on a VPS. The installation instructions could do a with a bit of guidance on how to properly manage Node versions with nvm without making systemd cranky, but overall a pretty easy, pleasant experience as far as self-hosting goes.

I and EFF Director Cindy Cohn joined the Plutopians for a free-wheeling discussion of digital civil liberties activism, give the 'ol podcast a listen! plutopia.io/cindy-cohn-a...

A lot of modern popular music leaves me cold (or maybe I'm just getting old), but Honey Water by Japanese Breakfast is phenomenal. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEZ0...

Lol, Google's gotten so much criticism about how bad search has become that they've added a tab/search mode called Forums that is basically the trick everyone's been doing of site:reddit.com to actually find relevant results.

Ok, someone did it and has the greatest car bumper sticker of all time: "Keep honking. I'm listening to Alice Coltrane's 1971 meteoric sensation 'Universal Consciousness.'"

If something is bringing you suffering because you think it's interfering with or getting in the way of what you want, ask yourself if what you want is truly what YOU want, or if society has merely told you from a very young age that it's what you SHOULD want.

This is absolutely wild, and has me wondering about a future where AI simulacra of deceased individuals are accepted as valid witnesses in trials, especially in any scenario where the outcome hinges around what the deceased would have wanted the outcome to be. www.404media.co/i-loved-that...

The unfortunate thing about utopian plans for the world and the fortunate thing about dystopian plans for the world is that the world has other plans.

You have to admire Apple's audacity in making a show where you laugh at a megacorp gifting its abused employees with waffle parties, wondering what idiot would fall for such a stupid bribe, all while you relax on the couch at the end of a hard day and reward yourself with some Severance as a treat.

Every attempt to control others eventually results in the creation of the means of your own control.

You may think I have forgotten or ignored your text or email, but I can assure you that not only have I not forgotten it, even if you sent it six months ago, but that I've been spending those six months feeling guilty that I haven't had a chance to reply to you yet.

Programmer friends, what are some upcoming conferences this year that might be worth attending? Especially interested in conferences that will be talking about the latest and greatest in web technologies, open source, and intelligent ways of integrating AI into one's workflow.

"The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions-these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning." -Roland Barthes

Believe it or not, I think the thing I hate about the current administration the most is how cynical and disillusioned they have made young people about the future, and that it's really hard for me to argue that they're wrong.

Our meetup next month features Louis Rossmann discussing right to repair, join us!

You know it's a satisfying band practice when you learn to do a pretty decent cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart, Blue Monday, and True Faith in thirty minutes.

Successfully rooted my phone and installed CalyxOS on it. The experiment to de-Googlefy my Android begins.

Ugh, there's something about my python3 config that causes an xed version dependency issue that breaks upgrading Linux Mint to version 22. Thank goodness for Timeshift backups and bootable media. Now to figure out why my python install is borked.

The Superb Owl was fine, I guess. Kendrick killed it, though. And to have Samuel L. Jackson as Uncle Sam telling Kendrick to make himself acceptable to the American public, all while he did his own thing, powerful.

So, ByteDance just launched their OmniHuman-1 video deepfake product, and...it's truly, staggeringly good. We are about to return to a world before the invention of the photograph, where there isn't really such a thing as objective photographic or video evidence of events as they actually happened.

One of Musk's DOGE minions is the heir to the Lesser Evil Himalayan Pink Salt Popcorn fortune. What.

It won't make you private to 3rd party ATProtocol clients, but going here and checking Logged-out visibility will prevent Bluesky itself from showing your profile and posts to people not logged into the website/app. bsky.app/settings/pri...

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where [it] becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains,...and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater." -Frank Zappa

To all those who have made a deal with the devil thinking the ends justify the means, just remember that nothing ever ends.

So it's Blame Canada, I see.

What's more dangerous, a bot that tells the truth, or a human who lies?

I've started a starter pack to attempt and locate/centralize local Austin orgs on Bluesky worth following. Feel free to both use it and let me know in the comments if you know of accounts I should add to it. go.bsky.app/Se26w1K

Be suspicious of any statement about the average human being that is a negative statement. Remember, your brain will be biased to believe said negative statement, even if it's not true, as it then allows your ego to go, "Yep, that's terrible, and that's not true of me, as I'm above average."

In Lamont v. Postmaster General, the right of US citizens to receive speech from outside the US, even if the speech was propaganda, was affirmed. Thus, with the unanimous decision to ban Tiktok, we now see that our entire Supreme Court no longer cares about consistency in the application of the law.

Our meetup next month features Frank Force discussing code golfing to create digital art, join us! www.meetup.com/eff-austin/e...

In Heaven, everything is fine. RIP, David Lynch. Possibly our greatest living director, no one has ever stared with such passion and humanity into the dark heart of the human soul lurking just below its innocent surface. May he find a better world than this one he helped us all navigate.

Why yes, I did get fed up with my VPN still not supporting split tunneling for the desktop linux client, so I went ahead and wrote a cronjob/shell script that automatically updates my ip routing table to bypass the vpn and route straight to my gateway for ip addresses in my allow list.

The King Of Comedy perfectly predicted social media, influencer culture, and parasocial relationships. For attention is the only currency. Nothing is too immoral, too shameful, too indecent, as long as it gets you enough attention, all will be forgiven, and even celebrated.

Our next meetup will feature Kathy Mitchell discussing the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, join us!

Disneyworld is a far more pleasant hyperreality than my suburban one I usually inhabit (and I quite like my neighborhood!), it's truly capitalism's greatest triumph, creating and selling you your dreams. Postmodernist snark aside (let's embrace our metamodern sincerity), what an incredible place.

Modern social media, with its endlessly scrolling feeds and algorithmically served content is all about erasing the past, erasing history, erasing context. It's an endless present, an endless now.

Today's lightbulb moment in language: We call financial penalties fines because you have to pay them to make things fine. I realized this because the French word for fine is amende, i.e., you have to pay it to make amends.

The fastest way to hack a feed algorithm is to assert a norm-violating opinion. You will get engagement both from people who agree with said norm, and are outraged at the idea that anyone could feel differently, and from people who secretly hate said norm, as you've now validated said opinion.

This should be fun :)

Reactionaries are fundamentally fighting a battle against the human spirit, hence their project is always doomed to failure, if only from their own partisans succumbing to their own natures. "Thinkst thou because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale." -Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

This is an annual tradition I look forward to. If you want really smart people discussing geopolitics with the right mix of cynicism and optimism, with a good dash of snark, check it out.

The annual "State of the World" conversation featuring @bruces.bsky.social and yours truly will begin New Year's Eve 2024 - look for the link around that time. #SOTW

It's amazing what black paint can do to transform a space. Exciting things brewing in South Austin. Can't wait to share the possibilities with the community. Yes, I'm vagueposting, sorry. Patience, and anticipation...

Remember, network effects. A social media service's utility scales polynomially with the number of users, especially users who post and share content. If you want this place to gain value for you and others, start posting more. You will generate a positive feedback loop. Let's do this together.

I'm going to start working on this, and will add to it as more major media outlets join Bluesky. I expect the pace to pick up very soon and very significantly. Major media has let us down significantly over the last ten years, but it's still vital to know what's being reported. go.bsky.app/2JyEju6